Strong nonreciprocal acoustic extinction and asymmetric audibility from spinning fluid scatterers

Lorentz reciprocity places important constraints on the response of systems to wave excitations, and surpassing these constraints is of both fundamental and applied interest. In the context of scattering, reciprocity requires that the total extinction of an object is identical when excited from opposite directions, regardless of the asymmetry of the scatterer. Here, we demonstrate that, by combining multiple scatterers that break time-reversal symmetry, this extinction symmetry can be largely violated. We consider spinning cylinders, demonstrating that nonreciprocity must be paired with broken parity symmetry to enable large extinction contrast. As a dramatic example, we show a system that strongly scatters when excited from one side, but it is cloaked for the opposite excitation. Our results pave the way for approaches to asymmetric audibility and scattering manipulation, and they may readily translate to other wave domains.